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Blog Post
May 10, 2024
Here is a Mother’s Day shout-out to all the mothers working at international financial institutions (IFIs) around the world, and especially to mothers at the two banks I know best: the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, where I worked for a total of almost two decades with at least ...
Blog Post
May 22, 2023
The climate mitigation work is an urgent development mission. The world has probably already lost the battle to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. Even now, millions of people in developing countries are suffering and dying due to natural disasters and sea level rise made worse by past an...
Blog Post
June 08, 2020
There are two ways to look at progress in the developing world context. I think the right way to look at it is that there has been tremendous success. The downside is that, as we see with the threat of COVID as well as the risk of more natural disasters because of climate change, that they and the e...
WORKING PAPERS
November 29, 2018
Does governance matter for the long-run financing and effectiveness the multilateral development banks? Does their system of weighted voting matter for their long-run access to financing and their effectiveness as development institutions? Does the voting structure involve some tradeoff between the ...
Blog Post
April 25, 2018
A large proportion of revenue gains over the last two decades has come from countries’ efforts to improve the design and compliance of consumption and other indirect taxes, particularly the VAT (value-added tax); in doing so, the objective has been to minimize VAT’s regressive effe...
Blog Post
March 05, 2018
Mohamed Bouazizi is the man whose protest sparked the Arab Spring in December 2010. Bouazizi was a typical “struggler,” as in the title of my keynote speech at the Australasian Aid conference several weeks ago: “Strugglers: This Century’s New Development Challe...
Blog Post
November 08, 2017
World Bank President Jim Kim is hoping the bank’s 189 shareholders will agree to increase the current capital of the bank’s “hard” window sometime in 2018. But the US wants to link any support for a recapitalization to World Bank “graduating” China—and perha...
ESSAYS
August 02, 2017
Globalization is under attack in the West. The debate among pundits is no longer about whether globalization is to blame or not. It is about why globalization is now the bugaboo it has become. A common thread are changes, for the worse, in the economic and social standing of the Western middle class...